Bunker Labs aims to help veterans with startups

Wayne State students turn to analog form of advertising for their digital business

Chad Livengood/Crain's Detroit Business

Armando Arteaga (standing) is a co-founder of ToDoolie, an gig website that pairs college student workers with homeowners with household chores and tasks. Arteaga, a U.S. Army veteran, is part of the Veterans in Residence program at Bunker Labs in WeWork's co-working office space in Campus Martius. Arteaga and the other veterans talked about their startup businesses during an event Bunker Labs held on Sept. 20 at WeWork.

The co-founders of a Detroit startup company that pairs college students with homeowners for household chores are finding that their gig economy online platform is best advertised in an analog format — old-fashioned paper fliers.

ToDoolie, a service created by three Wayne State University students, began distributing 30,000 fliers around metro Detroit this month after Facebook and Instagram advertising didn't produce the customer base the millennial business owners thought it would.

"Contrary to what a lot of people think, we've actually tried Facebook ads and they did not work as well as we thought they were going to be," said Armando Arteaga, a co-founder of ToDoolie. "Actually, word-of-mouth and doorknob fliers have been the most impactful marketing in our business."

Arteaga and his business partners Sergio Rodriguez and Jose Romo-Puerta are learning lessons in entrepreneurship on the fly as they attempt to scale their business from three separate co-working spaces in Detroit that offered free space.

Rodriguez, a Wayne State graduate student, is stationed in TechTown. Romo-Puerta, a marketing student at Wayne State, is working out of Bamboo Detroit's downtown office.And Arteaga, who got out of the U.S. Army in March, is stationed at WeWork's Campus Martius building through Bunker Labs, a business support organization for military veteran entrepreneurs.

Arteaga is one of eight military veterans who are part of Bunker Labs' Veterans of Residence program that provides them free office space and support services for six months while they start or scale a business. WeWork provides Bunker Labs with free co-working space at its 1001 Woodward Ave. office.

The veteran-owned businesses incubating at Bunker Labs vary from food, beverage and personal care startups to a Brighton-based company called Templar Life Safety that's selling trauma emergency medical supply kits for schools, churches and public places in the event of a mass shooting.

By being based at WeWork, Bunker Labs is able to connect veteran entrepreneurs with other former servicemen and women, as well as individuals without military backgrounds who are working out of the shared downtown office space, said T.J. Typinski, a city leader for Bunker Labs Detroit.

"A lot of these businesses, they just didn't have a home to go to," said Typinski, owner of The Dominant Approach, a digital marketing and design firm. "The value for these veterans, for these veter-preneurs, is to be able to work and collaborate with other veteran entrepreneurs — to be able to speak their language."

Shelly Rood, a 16-year military veteran from Harrison Township, is part of the second class of the Veterans in Residence program launched this month.

She started a company called Mission: Ambition LLC that sells a subscription-based personal care box delivered monthly by mail to women in the military or law enforcement.

Rood said working out of WeWork has given her the chance to network with businesspeople she wouldn't have met working out of her home.

"The hands I've been able to shake here in Detroit — you're talking the real movers and shakers, the hustlers — I have made so many connections through Bunker Labs that I would not have been able to make on my own," Rood said in an interview at Detroit Homecoming for the Crain's "Detroit Rising" podcast.

For fledgling startup businesses working on shoestring budgets, the free office space is invaluable.

ToDoolie has generated $20,000 in total sales since May, Arteaga said.

That works out to about 1,300 hours of student labor over the summer months.

The company charges homeowners $15 per hour for college student workers, who do everything from painting and pulling weeds to raking leaves and household cleaning.

Arteaga said he and his business partners are considering raising their rates in 2019 to $19 per hour and paying the student workers $14 per hour.

"The challenges that we're facing currently is getting to scale," said Arteaga.

ToDoolie just got free help from 11 programmers who volunteered to help build out its online platform, Arteaga said.

And now they just have to wait and see how the flier campaign goes as work orders come in for fall leaf-raking followed by snow-shoveling this winter.